FAR LESS THAN HALF HAS BEEN TOLD

FAR LESS THAN HALF HAS BEEN TOLD As I read the engrossing history of the United States by Edward E. Baptist, THE HALF HAS NEVER BEEN TOLD (2016), I have come yet again to a very real fork in the road. This fork is the divergence from the facts about our nation's irresolute emergence from a colony into a free-standing entity. Here I mean and make particular reference to the extraordinarily revolutionary ideals that are passionately, poetically, prophetically, philosophically set forth in the stirring Declaration of Independence of the United States. That immortal, iconic document of 1776 is routinely attributed to the authorship of an "enlightened" Virginian, who was an enslaver of hundreds of Africans, a baronial landowner, who was member of the Continental Congress as a Virginia delegate, the inestimable Thomas Jefferson. Mr. Jefferson is alleged to have written the Declaration of Independence by most American historians and scholars, in spite of his own self-interests, and, indeed, contrary to those very self-interests, in his hundreds of enslaved Africans. Future President Thomas Jefferson has not, himself, to my knowledge, ever claimed any authorship of this immortal edict. That is because he was not its author! instead, Jefferson was an but an editor (1 of 5 editors on the editorial committee of the Continental Congress) of the original draft of the remarkable DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. I quote Mr. Edward E. Baptist's book: "Back on the east side of the mountains, meanwhile , slavery in the old Virginia and Maryland tobacco districts were increasingly unprofitable , and even some enslavers were conceding that enslavement contradicted all of the new rhetoric about rights and liberty. In his 1782 NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA , Virginia's governor Thomas Jefferson complained that slavery transformed whites 'into despots.' Jefferson's first draft of the Declaration of Independence had already railed against British support for the Atlantic slave trade. Despite his ownership of scores of enslaved African Americans, Jefferson realized that the sale of human beings could turn his soaring natural rights rhetoric into a lie as sour as the hypocrisies of old Europe's corrupt tyrants. Eventually, Jefferson embraced the hypocrisy, even failing to free the enslaved woman who bore his children. 'Sally--an old woman worth $50,' read the inventory of his property taken after his death [1826]. Yet in 1781, his Declaration 's claim that all were endowed with the natural rights to liberty provided a basis to push the Massachusetts Supreme Court into conceding--in the case of a runaway slave named Quock Walker--that slavery was incompatible with the state's core principles.' P.6. First of all, Edward Baptist's reference to Thomas Jefferson's book NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA is from 1782, six years after his alleged authorship of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. While I don't quibble with Baptist's characterization of slaveholders being "despots," --he would certainly know, firsthand--I do note that Baptist does not mention that book's "Query XIV." That racist chapter in Jefferson's infamous book claims that blacks are inferior to whites mentally, morally, physically and that black women are sexually like 'orangutans.' I mention Query XIV not so much to demonstrate Baptist's mendacity, as to show that Jefferson was not in sympathy with the emancipation of slaves as expressed in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence. That is because Jefferson was not the author of the most famous testament to American, human, divine, civil rights yet written. Indeed, Thomas Paine, was another true "founding father," who, though its most famously known writer, and author of its most revolutionary tracts, has, been cruelly, negligently, written out of American history, by omission or by commission by journalists, historians, politicians. Nonetheless, Thomas Paine, who wrote the COMMON SENSE, and CRISIS series under the pen name, "Publius," was its author; Thomas Jefferson was but one of five members of an editing committee that struck out that controversial portion about England's King George III's infamously causing the enslavement of innocent beings on the coast of Africa who had never offended him in the least and who had decimated natives to this land. Political differences of the North and South were textually compromised in the editing room, in which Benjamin Franklin, an abolitionist, of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was present as an editor. It was Franklin who had brought Thomas Paine to America from England that Thomas Paine might use his rhetorical powers to stir up the gifts of the divided, docile, nearly defeated colonists, who were intimidated by Mother Country's regnal dominion ! I dare say that Thomas Paine succeeded handsomely! Too handsomely in retrospect did Paine succeed to be granted the honor of authorship! Thomas Paine, an itinerant and true political revolutionary, also proved his mettle by writing the famous DECLARATION OF RIGHTS tract of France that produced the French Revolution, in 1789. France was the land to which Thomas Paine had been invited and emigrated after the American Revolution before the Constitution was written. France's stirring DECLARATION OF RIGHTS document was that spark not only that toppled the monarchy in France, but, more importantly, that document's philosophical fervor and rhetorical sublimity had inevitably unleashed the furious revolutionary geniuses of the "Haitian Revolution" on Saint Dominque's portion of the island of Hispaniola, among the caste of mulattoes and millions of black slaves. In a sense, Thomas Paine's epochal revolutionary writings had freed three nations of baleful slavery from monarchist dominion. DECLARATION OF RIGHTS reads substantially similarly to the earlier in time American DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE. Edward Baptist's book's title is apropos, if too modest. Far less than half has been told by himself and by others as this essay states. My sources are many. The writings of Thomas Paine are one source. Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" is another source, The internet is another source. Do your own research to confirm mine. I am certain there is a blessing therein!